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It's that off-by-one nature of intervals that always bumps me. The difference between note a and b is (a-b+1). Calling an octave "an octave" feels to me like calling a numeric system with digits 0x0-0xf as "base 17"



By your logic, an octave/unison would be "seventh"/"zeroth"? (Note that "octave" literally means "eighth" in Latin.) I would think that could work too but the established terminology is not inconsistent. It's just 1-indexed. A lot of things are 1-indexed, in fact I think almost everything in spoken English is 1-indexed. A lot of mathematics, like number theory, is also 1-indexed. I think software engineers are a little too obsessed with 0-indexed things. I understand that things not being standard is annoying to us but pretending like this somehow makes music terminology broken is going too far.

I don't see how 0x0-0xf could be called base 17. 0xf is 15. Did you mean base 15? I think if mathematics terminology developed differently it could be called base 15. The same way binary is 0 and 1 but we call it base 2 because there are 2 digits, but we could totally call it base 1 too, who cares, it's all convention.




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